This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Can Quebec cardinal Marc Ouellet save the Catholic Church?

By Daniel Baird

Fri., Feb. 15, 2013

When Pope Benedict XVI leaves the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace at precisely 8 p.m. on Feb. 28, he will, as quickly as wine turns into blood and bread into flesh, cease to occupy the throne of Peter and revert to his previous identity as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Two weeks later, 117 cardinal electors (only cardinals under the age of 80 are allowed to participate in the election of a new pope) will essentially be locked into the Sistine Chapel, assisted by physicians and cooks, beneath Michelangelo’s staggering depiction of the last judgment, to elect a new pope. A new pope is expected to be announced, white smoke drifting from a Vatican chimney, before Easter.

When Pope John Paul II died, the Vatican announced to the crowds in St. Peter’s Square that “we are all orphans.” It was an event, at least in the Catholic world, of tragic dimensions. The intense suffering he stoically endured during his final years, and his near-mystical piety, makes it all but certain that he will become a saint. Benedict’s resignation, shocking to the extent that a pope has not resigned in some 600 years, is considerably less momentous: after consulting both his conscience and God, he said, he had decided that both his mind and body were too weak to carry out his duties in the fast-paced, demanding, 21st century world.

Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet. left, is greeted by Pope Benedict at the Vatican on Dec. 12, 2011. Ouellet could be in the running to become the next pope. (Riccardo De Luca / The Associated Press)

A quiet, introspective man clearly more comfortable in a book-lined study than on the public stage, Benedict’s legacy has been terminally tainted by a brutal and still ongoing sexual abuse scandal and the faltering, defensive way he mishandled it, and also because of his intransigent, reactionary stances on major public issues — women in the clergy, birth control, gay marriage — that starkly illustrated the ways in which this elderly German professor was out of touch with contemporary life.

Secularization has been happening for decades, and, according to some, like Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, for centuries. Under Benedict, the church went into free fall, ceding much of whatever moral and spiritual high ground it might have retained in Western Europe and North America. The big question now is whether the largely European cardinals holed up in the Sistine Chapel will elect a dynamic pope capable of reviving the foundering church.

Days after Benedict’s emotional final public mass, Rome is of course abuzz with speculation as to who the next pope will be. The brilliant Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana is on everyone’s short list, as is Cardinal Odilo Scherer of Sao Paulo and Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, as well as a host of Italian Vatican insiders like Cardinal Angelo Scola and Gianfranco Ravasi. But one of the contenders everyone has been watching for years is a Canadian: Cardinal Marc Ouellet, now the powerful prefect of the Congregation of Bishops (responsible for making final recommendations for possible bishops to the pope) and head of the Pontifical Commission on Latin America.

Article Continued Below

Born in Lamotte, Que., the now 69-year-old cardinal was educated at the Grand Seminaire de Montréal and then at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where he received his PhD. Ouellet’s rise in the church was rapid, with commissions in Quebec and Colombia and the Vatican before being called by John Paul II to be archbishop of Quebec in 2001 and then brought to his current position by Benedict in 2010.

Ouellet’s firm conservatism was unpopular among priests in Quebec, who regarded him as an outsider and instrument of Rome. During his years abroad, they said, he had lost touch with the culture of Quebec. The broader public, too, fumed against his views on abortion and Christian education, but his homey, personal warmth, earnest, old-fashioned piety and charisma have made him popular among younger Catholics in Quebec.

With the centre of Catholicism decisively shifting away from Europe to Latin America and Africa, a man untainted by the sexual abuse and corruption scandals who speaks fluent Spanish, has a deep relationship with South America, has shown himself able to negotiate the vagaries of the Roman curia, is confident in the spotlight, and who is also from one of the oldest and most important strongholds of Catholicism outside Europe might well be a compelling candidate.

Nonetheless, the sexual abuse scandal, which, with new reports of nuns abusing female students in Ireland, seems never to end, has caused inestimable damage that has eroded the authority of the church on every level. It is hard to imagine that a single figure, whoever he may turn out to be, can reverse the tide of the church’s painful demise.

Heading into the 50th anniversary of Vatican II this fall, with its initial promise of adapting Catholicism to modern society, the only way to save the church may be to enact swift, dramatic reforms across a wide range of issues that medieval canon law and the culture of the Vatican are ill prepared to carry out. And Marc Ouellet, a worshipful student of John Paul II, is no reformer. Whether or not Ouellet ascends to the throne of Peter, we may be witnessing the gradual but irreversible implosion of one of the world’s oldest continuous institutions. It may end up like the British monarchy, a decorative reminder of the past but without real authority.

Daniel Baird is a freelance writer who frequently writes about the Catholic Church.

More from The Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com